Red Admiral, Vanessa atalanta

On 22nd June I was working in my study when I notice a butterfly out of the corner of my eye. I am easily distracted that way, so looked round and saw it was a Red Admiral and it was inspecting the nettles right outside my window. I spotted it laying an egg and, as I have mentioned before, my study window looks out on the hen run, so I doubt any caterpillars would last long.

At lunchtime I popped out and picked the nettle that the egg had been laid on. I kept it in a jar of water with a hole punched through the lid. All of these photos were taken with my phone. This one was taken looking through a microscope.

Seven days later the egg hatched, but I couldn't find the caterpillar. After three days I spotted it in the young shoot at the top of the nettle stem. It stayed there for another five days in a sort of web it had made and once it had eaten most of the young leaves it moved to a larger leaf further down the stem, where it started constructing a tent.

I kept putting fresh nettle stems in the jar and I noticed that the caterpillar would spend the day inside its tent. The following morning I would find the tent completely eaten and a new tent formed on the new stem. This happened for a further 19 days during which I didn't see the caterpillar.

On the 25th July no new tent had been formed and I managed to see the caterpillar hanging in a characteristic J-shape inside the leaf tent. The following day it had formed a chrysalis and I was able to open up the tent to get a better look.

It remained as a chrysalis until the 8th August, when it emerged as a butterfly. Over the previous two days the chrysalis darkened and I was able to make out the pattern of the top sides of the wings. A couple of hours before it emerged I could see the abdomen section of the chrysalis lengthen slightly, however, I still managed to miss the actual point of emergence!

So, it was seven days as an egg, 26 days as a caterpillar and 13 days as a chrysalis.

This is an almost identical story to the Red Admiral egg that was laid in the hen run last year. On that occasion the egg hatched after only four days, it also remained as a caterpillar for 26 days and it remained as a chrysalis for 16 days.

Once its wings had dried I took the butterfly outside. It spent a while warming up in the sun, then took off and did a couple of laps of the patio before flying off to join the other Red Admirals on the Buddleia.